Educational institutions worldwide are increasingly turning to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to provide their faculties with mobile desktops and to enable their students to connect securely to hosted curricula and examinations.
VDI simplifies the IT operations of universities by eliminating patching, provisioning and repair time, and offers instant delivery of custom classroom or laboratory applications for different fields of speciality.
"The Pivot3 vSTAC VDI appliance that consolidates server and storage resources into a single hardware appliance seems particularly well-suited to the South African market,” says Johan de Villiers, regional director of First Technology, one of SA's leading single-source providers of IT products and services. “It should be a success, as it eliminates the complexities, skill levels and costs normally associated with enterprise-class VDI installations.”
“We believe there is significant pent-up demand for a simple and affordable VMware-based VDI solution that can be easily deployed and scaled,” says Mike Holt, director of channels and strategic alliances at Pivot3. “First Technology is the ideal partner for us to work with in South Africa as they are one of the leading providers of IT products and services,” Holt concludes.
The first test trial in Africa was done successfully at the new Ukwanda Rural Clinical School, in Worcester, an initiative of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Stellenbosch University.
“We see a huge potential for this solution to address our IT infrastructure limitations to host large numbers of students during online assessments and exams,” says David Wiles, Stellenbosch University's Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences computer users area manager. “Until now, obtaining enterprise-class VDI has only been within the scope of corporate IT, as it was too costly and too complex for a university environment like ours.”
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